It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong
Too busy to post anything much as I am planning a project, which is a horrible, tedious, job, especially with Microsoft Project (or at least the version I am using). However, I did enjoy these two recent Dilbert cartoons that you can find here and here.
Is it worth upgrading to the latest version of MS Project? Have they finally made the program even slightly intuitive?
I’m getting rather annoyed with a lot of the nonsense that is being written in various blogs in reponse to the report of the Hutton Inquiry. People who know next to nothing about the background to the story sound off about Tony Blair or the BBC, based mainly on their own prejudices and second-hand information about what happened (links via Simon).
Hemlock recently noted that Spike was ideal for anyone who wanted to re-read articles they had already read in The Spectator or on Quamnet.com. This week’s edition of the magazine is true to form, but with a subtle alteration to at least one of the articles. Petronella Wyatt’s piece about Cape Town (as originally published) starts as follows:
Cape Town is as different from Johannesburg as Cheltenham is from London.
In Spike, Cheltenham becomes Sai Kung and London becomes Central, so that readers who have never heard of Cheltenham do not become too confused. In truth, I am not sure where this was meant to imply anything more than the simple comparison of city versus small town that is spelt out in the next paragraph. If it was, then it shouldn’t have been changed. If it wasn’t, it probably didn’t need changing anyway. Maybe one of the Spike sub-editors lives in Sai Kung and wishes us to believe that is an elegant spa town with a racecourse and various cultural events, rather than a bit of a dump with a few Italian restaurants.
Elsewhere in the magazine, their ‘man in Beijing’ seems to agree with my theory that the recent visit of the experts on the Basic Law to Hong Kong was nothing more than the start of a negotiating process during which the central government doesn’t wish to concede too much too quickly.
Unless I’m mistaken (which sadly I often am), Spike seems to be cutting back on the satire in favour of more serious and cultural stuff, though you have to wonder about the wisdom of printing an attack on a book that is a bestseller in the UK but probably not well known in Hong Kong (“Eats, Shoots and Leaves”), again from The Spectator.
I found this Dilbert cartoon quite amusing. Anyone who has ever supported a computer system will be aware that users really do keep doing the same thing over and over again in the hope that eventually it work. Amazingly, sometimes it does! If it doesn’t (which is the expected outcome) they will probably give up and perhaps try again later. There is a small chance that the users will remember exactly what they were doing when it didn’t work, and an even smaller chance that they will report these facts to anyone who could do anything about it. Users expect the support team to be psychic and know that something went wrong and why it happened. Or maybe they just don’t care!
The irony here is that when something goes wrong on my own PC, I don’t even remember that I installed an upgrade, let alone connect these two events. Hell, I sometimes even try doing something again in the hope that perhaps it will magically work this time.
Earlier this week I noticed this story about how the currency peg is making it more attractive to invest in equities or property. Then another piece yesterday, worrying that the Hong Kong Dollar is falling in value and that this may cause interest rates to rise and slow down the economy.
We need to get this into perspective – these are tiny changes in the value of the Hong Kong Dollar, which hasn’t moved more than 1% from US$1 = HK$7.73 for many years.
What has been happening is that HSBC and others have reduced the interest rates they pay to savers almost to zero, but the official base rate hasn’t changed. The effect of this is fairly marginal, given that they were previously paying (I think) 0.1% per annum. This is more a confidence thing – people have had long had money in the bank but were nervous about investing in property and equities, and now they feel more confident. The amount of interest paid by banks on money in savings accounts has low in Hong Kong for a long time, and no-one can have kept money there for the return they were getting!
Still, I suppose they have to write something!
A rather strange story from The Guardian about garages that are too small to park a car. I don’t normally have much time for consumer stories, since they typically serve to highlight that people have been naive or stupid, but this one is a bit mysterious:
It would appear that architects do not consider how much room is actually required for a car when designing a garage, but as both local authorities and house buyers assume that they would not design a garage that you can’t fit a car into, the dimensions are not checked. As a result, many homeowners end up having a garage they can’t park their car in.
I would be very unhappy if I bought a house with a garage and couldn’t fit my Renault Vel Satis* into it, but I suppose you could always use it as a granny flat or for your irritating teenage children.
* Only joking – the Renault Megane is not only cheaper but marginally less hideous, so I’d have one of those instead.
I’m getting rather bored with the latest virus (MyDoom). I have received a few of these email messages containing attachments, and also the follow-ups claiming I have sent out messages containing viruses.
I am intrigued by the logic behind this one, which seems to be aimed at people who will open an unexplained attachment from an unfamiliar sender even when it does not promise anything exciting. It may appeal to wannabe geeks because of the technical gibberish (“The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment) in some versions, but other than that why bother opening the message?
I looked carefully at the first one, didn’t recognize the sender, and deleted the message. Then I noticed something on Shaky’s site about the virus, and discovered that I was right to delete it. Now my virus checker has caught up, and tells me that there are nasty things in some of the incoming emails and deletes them for me.
The messages claiming I have sent viruses are bizarre, because they refer to an email address that I never use for sending mail, and come (with one exception) from people who I don’t know. So I ignore them.
The problem with email, as I have mentioned before, is that it holds a horrible fascination for many people, and they waste a lot of their time reading messages that they should really ignore, and (presumably) opening attachments and clicking on links. Which, of course, is why companies send spam emails – even if only 0.01% of recepients respond it’s still worthwhile.
Blockbuster is giving up on Hong Kong because (they say) shop rentals are too high. As the leases on their existing shops run out over the next 18 months, they will close down. Blockbuster came to Hong Kong after the KPS chain went bust, and took over many of the locations and most of the stock. However, I don’t think it has worked out quite the way they expected, and they have not expanded in Hong Kong or started up in China. In fact, over the last couple of years the shops have become increasingly tatty and it didn’t look as if they were doing very well. They recently starting selling second-hand DVDs purchased from their customers, which looked like a rather desperate ploy.
The days, DVDs are cheap enough to buy, so why bother renting? Smaller shops with lower overheads can sell and rent VCDs and DVDs more cheaply than Blockbuster, and at the top end HMV has a better selection and more space. Or there’s always the Internet, with CD Wow, Amazon, etc.
Shop rentals in Hong Kong are comparatively high, but companies with the right business model seem to survive.
[Just noticed that BWG has posted something similar with an identical headline. He’s not normally that topical!]
It’s cruel and unusual punishment, I tell you. This evening TVB Pearl screened a program called “Cheese Slices”, all about cheddar cheese. Not the horrible mass-produced stuff you can buy in a supermarket, but the real thing made in a traditional way. They showed Jamie Montgomery making the cheese, and Randolph Hodgson from Neal’s Yard Dairy tasting it. Apparently it was very good.
This is horribly unfair. Neal’s Yard Dairy is probably the best cheese shop in the world, selling good cheddar such as Montgomery’s and Keen’s, and other British cheeses of all descriptions, such as Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire and proper mature Stilton. But I’m in Hong Kong, and none of the good stuff is available here. My only hope is that the new Harvey Nichols will have a food hall and might sell some good cheese, but I’m not holding my breath.
Simon beat me to this one because I still haven’t had time to read this week’s Economist – that’s the problem when it arrives on a Monday and you have to work for a living.
He has noticed this story about fake watches in China. Well, actually it’s a story about the ‘surprising’ success of Omega in selling genuine watches when much cheaper copies are available. Simon comes over all moralistic:
But somewhere in the back of my mind is the moral dimension. Fakes are effectively a form of stealing. The original creator goes through the effort and expense of designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling the product only to have it ripped off in a matter of weeks and selling at a fraction of the price. There are rationalisations – just look at the fuss over “free” music over Napster, Kazaa and the like. These fakes may stimulate demand for the real thing. People who buy the fakes may never buy the real thing. But let’s face it, just like taking songs for free of the net or fake DVDs, these fake watches are just wrong.
Surely the conclusion we can draw from this story is that the markets for genuine and pirated are often very different. If you want, and can afford, a genuine Omega or Rolex watch you will unlikely to be satisfied with a copy. Equally, most people who buy copies would never buy the genuine article. In fact, the existence of fakes is proof that the original is desirable, and may even increase sales.
Of course, these companies will carry on saying that they expect the PRC government to do more to stop piracy, and one of the ironies is that the public destruction of copy watches is good publicity both for the originals and the fakes, but in reality it is not a major problem. Strangely the Economist seems to have a bit of a blind spot on this subject.
Ordinary Gweilo 